Android Use of the broad package (App) visibility (QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES) permission

[Debin Zhang]

Hi,

Google recently announced the new policy for the apps on the Play Store with regard to the QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES permission.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/10158779?hl=en#zippy=%2Cpermitted-uses-of-the-query-all-packages-permission%2Cexceptions%2Cinvalid-uses

Our Android App is Chromium-based. Chromium has QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES permission turned on by default. Does anyone have the experience of how to get this permission for your Chromium-based apps from the Play store?

Thank you

Debin

[K. Moon]

I don't see how being Chromium-based is relevant to this discussion: If your app needs the permission, then you have to deal with the Play Store. If this happens to be a permission your app needs because it's based on Chromium, I think the right thing to do would be to eliminate the need for the permission, not get special treatment for Chromium-based apps.

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[Torne (Richard Coles)]

As far as I'm aware the reason for Chromium having this permission is so that it can look up whether URLs that get loaded in the browser should be turned into intents to launch other apps (e.g. navigating to youtube.com launching the Youtube app instead of loading it in Chromium) - since any URL could be potentially matched by any app, Chromium needs the QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES permission to get correct results.

This is why the policy lists "browsers" as one of the acceptable use cases for this permission, because any browser that wants to implement this standard Android logic will need the permission.

So, if your app behaves like a browser and allows users to follow links to arbitrary sites, and you want this standard behaviour where they will be redirected to external apps when appropriate, then you will need this permission for your app, and will have to justify this as your app being browser-like.

If your app doesn't do that, then you may be able to just remove the permission, but you may also need to make changes to the Chromium code that's responsible for intent dispatching as it may not work as expected without the permission. I'm not aware of an existing configuration option to control this.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/chromium-dev/CACwGi-5iMHMNLo6x1QLMO35cff8FA_ymaY3GaHENZiDZkU%3DPJQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Debin Zhang]

Thanks! Excellent explanation. We want our app to work just like Chrome with some additional features. So we need that setting. I think the reason you give is acceptable to the Play Store admin team to allow our app to keep this setting.

Thanks again.